About 50 minutes into my “please play as long as you want” hands-on demo with 2XKO at EVO 2024, I realized I was going to miss the first match of my Tekken 8 pool. About 30 seconds later, I also realized I didn’t care; I was having too much fun. Getting DQ’ed from my Tekken bracket would suck, sure, but if I was lucky, I could probably play my loser’s game. And besides, I was getting to play with Vineeth "ApologyMan" Meka, a noted fighting game pro who was working on 2XKO, and showing my group what the game might look like at a high level. When was I going to get a chance to do that again, or see the game played like that, live, in front of me, pre-release? Compared to that, starting out my Tekken run in the loser’s bracket wouldn’t be...